Terrific trio

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet trumpeted both its illustrious past and promising future as it kicked off its season-closer, The Four Seasons and Other Works, Thursday.

The bill, featuring a trio of contemporary ballets, officially wraps up the RWB’s new artistic director Christopher Stowell’s inaugural season at the helm (though this 134-minute mixed bill is the final production programmed by former artistic director Andre Lewis before he stepped down last season).

Stowell has firmly settled in with dynamic, ambitious programming, as well as an ever-expanding treasure trove of more unfamiliar dance artists for local balletomanes.

One of those is award-winning American choreographer Dwight Rhoden, with the world première of his Odyssey plunging the multi-generational audience into an abstract landscape propelled by heightened kineticism and razor-sharp angularity.

Based in New York City, Rhoden (who was in attendance) is co-artistic director of Complexions Contemporary Ballet and a former principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, among others.

The piece, immediately evoking the high-octane energy of Itzik Galili’s Hikarizatto, unfolds through a series of six interconnected and cryptically titled sections including The Commitment Eternal, Truly, Madly, Deeply and Unlimited.

Dancers costumed in Christine Darch’s iridescent blue leggings and short skirts, with further shimmer added under stark lighting grids, formed tightly knit ensembles before breaking apart again throughout the resolutely athletic piece’s 35-minute length.

Guest conductor Daniel Black deftly led the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra during the thoughtfully curated pastiche score, with barely a moment’s repose.

Rhoden’s movement vocabulary — blending classical fluidity and intricate pointe work, daring lifts and vernacular body isolations — reaches its zenith during the fourth section, Forever Is a Lifetime, featuring second soloist Marco Lo Presti performing a searing pas de deux with corps de ballet member Maggie Weatherdon.

Here at last we see greater emotional connection and resonance that balances the otherwise often blurring choreography, which concedes nothing, even during second movement, We Stand Strong. Set to Samuel Barber’s scorched-earth Adagio for Strings, one might expect — or hope for — a greater choreographic mirroring of this deeply stirring music, which would have also provided more contrast within the piece.

The eclectic evening also featured the Canadian première of RWB choreographer-in-residence Cameron Fraser-Monroe’s Segatem, debuted in 2024 at the Fall for Dance Festival in New York. The soulful, 17-minute piece featuring music by Polaris Prize-winning artist Jeremy Dutcher, braids together classical, contemporary and traditional First Nations dance elements from the RWB School graduate’s ancestral heritage as a member of the Tla’amin Nation.

Local balletomanes will recall seeing Fraser-Monroe’s more recent T’el: The Wild Man of the Woods, His latest offering, featuring dramatic lighting (at times too dim) by Andy Moro, is similarly inspired by the strength and resilience of the Tla’amin elders, as told through oral teachings.

Unusually, the 17-minute performance also included an extended musical interlude/prologue of Cris Derksen’s Overture to the Spiderbeing and Treaties wafting from the orchestra pit before the curtain rose. This addition, presumably intended to allow dancers to rest and recharge after the Rhoden, thwarted the forward momentum of the evening, as did the inclusion of a short film of RWB dancers, gorgeous as it is, projected onto an upstage screen between selections.

Fraser-Monroe creates from a deep wellspring of experience, fused with imaginative storytelling and imagery as revealed through a combustion of artistic influences. The narrative Segatem is the latest in that canon, with a seven-dancer ensemble becoming a community around an elder, corps de ballet member Logan Savard.

Savard’s expressive acting skills, paired with an innate ability to shape-shift through a spectrum of emotions, bring to life the choreographer’s grounded movement lexicon, punctuated by enthralling lifts and white-knuckled falls built on a bedrock of trust.

Fraser-Monroe doesn’t supply easy answers, but poses potent questions about personal strength and the all-too-human need for others.

The second half featured renowned Canadian choreographer and former National Ballet of Canada artistic director James Kudelka’s The Four Seasons, a poignant, 45-minute work marking its 30th anniversary this year.

Set to Vivaldi’s masterful Baroque violin concerti (a special bravo to WSO concertmaster Karl Stobbe as featured soloist), the loosely narrative work follows the emotional arc of the generically titled “A Man” through the seasons of his own life, with Savard’s reprisal of the leading role having only grown deeper and richer over time.

We follow his Everyman through the infectiously youthful energy of Spring, which also highlighted principal dancer Alanna McAdie, before feeling the passionate heat of Summer. Autumn ultimately bleeds into Winter, and one of the most undeniably powerful moments of the RWB season all year long.

It’s impossible to adequately express the emotional impact of seeing legendary prima ballerina assoluta and former RWB principal dancer Evelyn Hart, now in the winter of own life, in her role reprisal of Winter Woman.

Joined by the equally stirring presence of former company dancers Dmitri Dovgoselets, Alexander (Sasha) Gamayunov and CindyMarie Small, their dignified rendering of Kudelka’s lyrical movement sequences, which served as counterpoint to Savard’s character’s ebbing life force, packed a punch, bringing a lump to many a throat.

While she has long hung up her pointe shoes, Hart’s sublime artistry has somehow only grown more luminous and ethereal over the years, with every perfectly placed finger, or graceful sweep of her slippered feet in service to the narrative.

The final image of her cradling Savard, flanked by Dovgoselets, Gamayunov and Small, felt like witnessing living history before our eyes.

winnipegfreepress.com/hollyharris